Twitter announced that it will prohibit any “free promotion” of other social media platforms on its site, marking the latest major policy change under billionaire owner Elon Musk.

“We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms,” Twitter Support wrote in a thread on Sunday. “However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.”

Twitter Support also said that it will remove accounts that are created for the sole purpose of promoting other social media platforms.

Twitter specifically said users cannot promote Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Pos accounts. Twitter will also prohibit users from sharing third-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee and lnk.bio. 

“We still allow cross-posting content from any social media platform,” Twitter Support added in its thread. “Posting links or usernames to social media platforms not listed above are also not in violation of this policy.”

The decision comes as many Twitter users — angry over Musk suspending tech journalists and other controversial changes — are looking for a new platform.

The latest policy change follows Musk’s decision to ban Twitter alternative Mastodon’s official account on the platform.

Musk said on Saturday he had lifted the temporary bans on several journalist’s accounts after conducting a poll where 59 percent of Twitter users called for those accounts to be restored immediately.

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican has defrocked an anti-abortion U.S. priest, Frank Pavone, for what it said were “blasphemous communications on social media” as well as “persistent disobedience” of his bishop.

A letter to U.S. bishops from the Vatican ambassador to the U.S., Archbishop Christophe Pierre, obtained Sunday, said the decision against Pavone, who heads the anti-abortion group Priests for Life, had been taken Nov. 9, and that there was no chance for an appeal.

Pavone had been investigated by his then-diocese of Amarillo, Texas, for having placed an aborted fetus on an altar and posting a video of it on two social media sites in 2016. He posts frequently about U.S. politics and abortion, and the video of the aborted fetus was accompanied by a post saying that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform would allow abortion to continue and that Donald Trump and the Republican platform want to protect unborn children.

Pavone remains a firm supporter of Trump: His Twitter handle features him wearing a “MAGA” hat with a background photo featuring the former U.S. president, whom many conservatives praise for his Supreme Court nominees who overturned the landmark decision guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion in the United States.

In a tweet Sunday, Pavone sounded defiant, comparing his fate to that of the unborn.

“So in every profession, including the priesthood, if you defend the #unborn, you will be treated like them! The only difference is that when we are “aborted,” we continue to speak, loud and clear.”

His supporters immediately denounced the measure, including the bishop of Tyler, Texas, Joseph Strickland, who referred to U.S. President Joe Biden’s support for abortion rights as “evil.”

“The blasphemy is that this holy priest is canceled while an evil president promotes the denial of truth & the murder of the unborn at every turn, Vatican officials promote immorality & denial of the deposit of faith & priests promote gender confusion devastating lives…evil,” Strickland tweeted.

Pavone had appealed to the Vatican over restrictions placed on his ministry in 2011 by the Amarillo bishop, succeeded in getting the restrictions eased, and relocated away from Texas while remaining active with Priests for Life.

In his letter, Pierre cited information from the Congregation for Clergy that Pavone had been laicized — he can no longer present himself as a priest — after being found guilty in a canonical proceeding “of blasphemous communications on social media and of persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop.” The letter was first reported by Catholic News Agency.

The statement said Pavone was given “ample opportunity to defend himself” as well as to submit to his bishop. “It was determined that Father Pavone had no reasonable justification for his actions.”

The statement concluded that since Priests for Life is not a Catholic organization, it would be up to the group to determine whether he could continue his role “as a lay person.”

Laicization, or being reduced to the lay state, is one of the harshest sanctions in the church’s canon law.

© Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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• Russia faltered in its air missions after invading Ukraine, stunted by the military’s rigidity.
• Russia’s military generally needed up to 72 hours for approval to attack new targets, per The NYT.
• Despite Russia having more military equipment than Ukraine, Ukrainian forces were more agile.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Moscow felt confident in its scores of military fighter jets and planes to help complete their mission as the country sought to overwhelm Ukrainian forces.

But while Russia had significantly more fighter jets than Ukraine, Russian soldiers found themselves hamstrung by their own military’s rigidity when seeking to attack new targets, according to a New York Times investigation published Saturday detailing the country’s failures throughout the conflict.

The effectiveness of the Ukrainian air defense system gave the country a critical advantage early on, allowing them to blunt any perceived advantages that Russia may have brought to the table purely from the scope of their weaponry.

Per The Times, Ukraine’s fighter jets “were outnumbered 15 to one in some early air battles” and Russia boasted “thousands of cruise and ballistic missiles” that American and Ukrainian intelligence officials thought would overwhelm the smaller military force.

But Ukraine came up with a plan, moving some of their defenses — including Buk and S-300 missile launchers and their control center — to different locations before the Russia began the conflict, according to senior Ukrainian officials who spoke with the Times.

Instead of attacking the new targets, Russia largely bombarded the old locations no longer being used by Ukraine.

Per US officials who spoke with The Times, up to “60 percent of Russian cruise missiles missed their intended targets.”

Russia was also slow to launch blitzes on new targets, according to the report.

The country’s “rigid and centralized” military generally required 48 to 72 hours to amend its intelligence and obtain approval to attack new targets, giving Ukrainian forces up to three days to move to different locations, per The Times.

This rigidity also hurt Russian forces, as their pilots struggled to cripple Ukraine’s defenses and flew without backup from additional fighter jets.

A Ukrainian pilot, Oleksii, who spoke with The Times, said the Russian pilots “flew straight without any cover.”

“Maybe the Russian Army didn’t read the Soviet books,” Oleksii told the newspaper. “They had bombs, they had rockets, but they didn’t cover their attack aircraft.”

The slow decision-making of the Russian military effectively shredded their plans to seize the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and several other cities early in the conflict.

Politicians can make dishonest pronouncements, repeatedly and confidently, and they can have surrogates echo their falsehoods. They can also get the media to give them free airtime to spread their deceit, and they can rely on the likelihood that interviewers will be too timid or ineffective at exposing the true nature of their drivel.

Sure, politicians want to win nominations and elections, and once they’re in office they want to remain there with high approval ratings. But Republicans politicians have cared so much about winning that it routinely comes at the expense of the truth as they throw America and its values under the bus. Indeed, if we’ve learned nothing this century in politics, it’s that the Republican Party loves to fool us.

The last two Republican excuses for President of the United States exemplify this trend at a dangerous level. As George W. Bush led the nation down a rabbit hole after 9/11 into the Iraq War, he delivered a flubbed warning while speaking at a magnet school in Nashville, Tennessee in September 2002. Imploring the audience against believing the Iraq regime, Dubya’s pronouncement was oozing with projection: “Fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again!”

Unfortunately, America was fooled again, re-electing Bush to a second term, and then later helping a fascist man-child gain enough votes to eke out an Electoral College win in 2016. Even after a record two impeachments and a failed insurrection against his own government, Donald Trump has continued to fool a large swath of Americans.

The New York Post’s editorial board, which has defended Trump until recently, is finally calling for an end to all the fooling. “Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us 1,438 times, and it may finally be too much,” the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid wrote. For the Post, Trump’s recent “major announcement” of his digital card collection was a bridge too far. “Don’t give any money to con artist Trump,” the headline warns.

Ultimately, it’s up to each of us to do our own candidate vetting instead of simply getting wrapped up in some populist fever. We can also help others to not be fooled, by writing letters to the editor, sharing and commenting on Palmer Report articles, talking to others, and volunteering for campaigns and causes that promote democracy, transparency, and dignity. America can’t afford to be fooled by Republicans ever again.

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U.S. lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, on Sunday pressed Democratic President Joe Biden to take action to manage an expected wave of asylum seekers at America’s southern border when COVID-era restrictions are set to end this week.

U.S. border cities are bracing for an influx of asylum seekers after a U.S. judge in November moved to strike down a policy enacted by the Trump administration in 2020 that has allowed migration authorities to rapidly send asylum seekers back to Mexico and other countries.

The policy, known as Title 42, is due to end on Dec. 21, and thousands of asylum seekers have been lining up at the U.S.-Mexico border ahead of the easing of restrictions.

On Saturday, the west Texas border city of El Paso declared a state of emergency, citing hundreds of migrants sleeping on the streets in cold temperatures and the thousands being apprehended every day.

“It’s a very dire situation,” U.S. Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas, a Republican, told CBS’s “Face the Nation”.

Gonzales called on Biden to revive past policies that tried to speed up asylum review and expedite deportations.

U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who also represents Texas, urged Biden to enact a policy requiring people to only request asylum at official border crossing points.

“And if they don’t follow that pathway they need to go back,” Cuellar told “Face the Nation”.

Republicans made calls for tighter immigration policies a key message in their 2022 midterm election campaigns.

After winning a narrow majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in November, some Republican lawmakers are calling for the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for what they see as a failure of border policy under Biden.

One of the loudest Republican voices for tighter border policy, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, on Sunday told ABC news the end of Title 42 would bring “total chaos.”

While Gonzales, the Republican lawmaker, said America was poised to receive a “hurricane of migrants,” the Biden administration has pushed back at arguments that ending Title 42 amounted to an opening of U.S. borders to illegal immigrants.

“These aren’t people who are attempting to illegally cross the border,” Keisha Lance Bottoms, a White House aide, said on “Face the Nation”. “These are people who are presenting themselves, asking that they be processed in accordance with the laws of the United States.”

Still, pressure appeared to be growing on the Biden administration, even within his own party. U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat, also appearing on “Face the Nation,” urged Biden to ask for an extension of Title 42.

“The president needs to find a way,” Manchin said.

Twitter on Sunday said that it will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames.

The move would impact content from social media platforms like Meta Platforms’ (META.O) Facebook and Instagram, along with Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post while allowing cross-content posting, Twitter support said in a tweet.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who recently invested in social media platform Nostr, replied to the Twitter support post with one word: “Why?”. In a reply to another user posting about the Nostr promotion ban, Dorsey said, “doesn’t make sense”.

Short video-platform TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance Ltd, was not included in the list.

Last week, Twitter disbanded its Trust and Safety Council, a volunteer group formed in 2016 to advise the social media platform on site decisions.

The policy change follows other chaotic actions at Twitter since Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla (TSLA.O), bought the social network. He fired top management and laid off about half of its workforce, while seesawing on how much to charge for Twitter’s subscription service Twitter Blue.

Musk also suspended the accounts of several journalists over a controversy on publishing public data about the billionaire’s plane.

Musk reinstated the accounts after criticism from government officials, advocacy groups and journalism organizations from several parts of the globe on Friday, with some saying the microblogging platform was jeopardizing press freedom.

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